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Tuesday, July 06, 2021

07/06 Links Pt1: After Palestinians reject deal, Israel to send 700,000 vaccines to South Korea; Israel’s Critics are Repulsed by Jewish Sovereignty and Military Power

From Ian:

After Palestinians reject deal, Israel to send 700,000 vaccines to South Korea
Israel will send South Korea some 700,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that are due to expire shortly in a deal signed between the two nations on Tuesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced, calling the deal a “win-win” situation for both countries.

The deal comes weeks after the Palestinian Authority backed out of a similar agreement, saying the vaccine doses were too close to their expiration date despite Israel using the same batches to vaccinate its teens.

Under the deal with Seoul, Israel will supply doses for immediate use that are set to expire by the end of the month. In return, Israel will receive the same number of doses from South Korean orders later in the year.

“We continue to protect the lives of Israeli citizens,” Bennett said in a statement.

“The vaccines are efficient and life-saving — that’s a fact. We agreed to an exchange that is a win-win situation. South Korea will receive vaccines from our existing stocks and we will be repaid from their future orders,” Bennett said.

The agreement was negotiated by Israel’s Health Ministry together with the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Council.

The statement said the agreement was made with the cooperation of Pfizer and came after several conversations in recent days between Bennett and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

The agreement will go into effect in the next few days after South Korea inspects the vaccines, the statement said. The Korean vaccines will arrive in Israel sometime during the fourth quarter of 2021.


Israel confirms vaccine less effective against Delta variant, eyes third dose
Israel’s Health Ministry released data on Monday showing that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine appears to largely prevent hospitalization and serious cases, but is significantly less effective against preventing the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus.

According to the ministry, the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 has dropped by some 30 percent to 64%, given the spread of the Delta variant. The data shows that during May, when the strain was less prevalent, the vaccine was 94.3% effective.

The Delta variant, which is believed to be twice as contagious as the original strain of COVID-19, is thought to be responsible for 90% of new cases in Israel over the past two weeks.

The data, however, also shows that the vaccine is still highly effective against preventing serious symptoms and hospitalization. During May, that figure stood at 98.2%, and during June, it was 93%.

On Monday evening, the Health Ministry said that 369 people had been diagnosed with coronavirus since midnight, bringing the total number of active cases in the country to 2,766.

There were 70 people hospitalized and 35 in serious condition. A week ago there were just 22 people in serious condition.


Israel’s Critics are Repulsed by Jewish Sovereignty and Military Power
After events like the recent Israel-Hamas war, people inevitably raise the question of why relatively minor skirmishes involving Israel capture so much of the world’s attention, while much bloodier and more geopolitically significant conflicts barely raise the world’s eyebrows.

I think the answer is obvious, though rarely provided: many people—including many Jewish and Christian Zionists, are captivated by Jews having a sovereign state and exercising military power. Many more people, however, are repulsed by Israel’s sovereignty and strength.

On the repulsion front, consider that traditional Catholic theology posited that Jews were doomed to wander the earth, stateless and homeless, as punishment for rejecting Jesus. To see the Jews exercising dominion over Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land is a hard theological pill to swallow, one that the Catholic Church itself took decades to resolve. While the Church has largely come around, many traditionalist Christians have not.

More liberal Christian theologies, meanwhile, remain wedded to the notion that martyrdom, as suffered by Jesus, is the highest form of virtue. These liberals acknowledge and regret the unjust suffering endured by Jews in the Christian world for centuries. However, they see this suffering as uplifting Jews, with Jews being the martyrs to Christian sin just as Jesus was for the world’s sins.

In the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, Jews’ role was to use their martyrdom to be a prophetic voice for peace, indeed pacifism, and to work for humankind’s redemption. It was emphatically their role not to build a powerful state with a powerful military capable of inflicting military horrors of its own. Jews refusing to be victims is, ironically, seen as a betrayal of Christian ideals. This is why Christian critics of Israel so often accuse Jews of not learning anything from the Holocaust; in their mind, the Holocaust is a story about Christian sin and possible redemption via the actions of the victims; the fate of the Jewish people as a people is at best irrelevant.
Ruthie Blum: Of stars, stripes and red flags
She fails to mention, of course, that the "political affiliation" of those who did the flag-burning during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations is the same as that of the person hesitant to purchase potatoes from a vendor paying tribute to the Fourth of July with an American flag on his vehicle.

The fact that public gestures of patriotism are associated more with the right than the left is nothing new. Nor is this phenomenon exclusive to the United States. In Israel, flag-waving has come to be equated with the settler movement.

Take, for example, the recent controversy surrounding the traditional Jerusalem Day "flag march," an annual procession marking the liberation of the Holy City in the 1967 Six-Day War. The parade made up mostly of youths usually begins at Sacher Park and winds up at the Western Wall in the Old City.

This year, the anniversary coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, and the march was disrupted by eastern Jerusalem Arabs rioting against Jewish citizens and police, violence that – along with rocket barrages at Israel from Gaza – sparked Operation Guardian of the Walls against Hamas.

As a result, the government, still headed at the time by Netanyahu, postponed the flag march until June 15, when it finally took place. Its thousands of participants were referred to derogatorily by the press as "right-wing nationalists."

Though the radicals' sullying of patriotic icons is disconcerting, most Americans and Israelis celebrate their countries' independence with fireworks, barbecues and lots of flags – no matter which president is in the White House or what prime minister resides on Balfour Street.

This is not to say that the red flags should be ignored. On the contrary, the ills wrought by elite sectors bent on destroying the social fabric of the countries that provide them the liberty to do so are real and present.

But the good news needs stressing, as well. For each slip-up of figures like Lapid, for every tweet by Black Lives Matter activists and for all New York Times opinion pieces disguised as reportage, there are thousands of followers ready, willing and able to pounce.
NGO Monitor: Gaza May 2021: Demonization from Europe-funded NGOs
1. Adalah (Donors include Switzerland, EU, Broederlijk Delen [Belgium], Bread for the World-EED [Germany], Oxfam Novib [Netherlands], UNDP)

“Adalah welcomes the decision of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC) tonight (27 May 2021) to open an ongoing commission of inquiry (COI) that will examine, in-depth, the human rights violations committed by the State of Israel against Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. The mass killing of a civilian population in Gaza…” (May 27)

2. Al Haq (Donors include EU, Norway, Ireland, Italy, France, Spain)

“The announced-ceasefire does not end Israel’s institutionalised regime of racial oppression, domination and dispossession, embedded in Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid system imposed over the Palestinian people as a whole. Israel’s violence and oppression against the Palestinian people continues on a daily basis.” (May 27)

3. Al Mezan (Donors include EU, Netherlands, Diakonia [Sweden], Medico International [Germany])

“For years, Palestinian human rights organizations have repeatedly called on the international community to investigate Israel’s systemic regime of racial supremacy, oppression and domination over the Palestinian people and gross violations of international law….Among the violations that must be immediately investigated are Israel’s clearly apparent war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated during its recent military offensive against the Gaza Strip between 10-21 May 2021.” (May 29)

4. B’Tselem (Donors include EU, Norway, Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, DanChurchAid [Denmark], Trocaire [Ireland], Diakonia [Sweden], Bread for the World- EED [Germany], UNICEF, UNDP.)

“Bombing residential towers – that do not constitute a military target and make dozens of families homeless – is a war crime. The architects and leaders of the Israeli apartheid regime, who do not consider Palestinians as equal human beings deserving full human rights, should be prosecuted for this war crime.” (May 12)

5. Defense for Children International – Palestine (Donors include EU, Italy, Netherlands, Broederlijk Delen [Belgium],UNICEF)

“60 Palestinian children killed since Monday, widespread targeting of civilian buildings and infrastructure in #Gaza, and Israeli forces are broadcasting US weapons are involved. End US funding to the Israeli apartheid regime & enforce an arms embargo now.” (May 17 tweet Brad Parker)
Kielce Pogrom Which Took Lives of Holocaust Survivors in Poland Commemorated, as Controversy Over ‘Disgraceful’ Restitution Law Intensifies
Amid a continuing controversy over a new law that closes off Jewish restitution claims related to Nazi-era persecution, Polish leaders have marked the 75th anniversary of the worst eruption of antisemitic violence in postwar Poland.

Leading commemoration ceremonies on Monday in the city of Kielce in central Poland, President Andrzej Duda declared that in a “free, sovereign and independent Poland there is no room for any form of prejudice, for racism, for xenophobia, for antisemitism.”

A total of 42 Jews, including a newborn baby and a woman who was six months pregnant, were murdered and at least 40 wounded during the July 4, 1946 pogrom in the city of Kielce, in central Poland. Like other aspects of Poland’s wartime record towards the more than three million Jews who resided there before the Nazi invasion in 1939, the pogrom has become a key focus for present-day Polish ultranationalists, who argue that the slaughter was perpetrated by the communist authorities for the purpose of discrediting the nationalist opposition.

According to the Princeton University historian Prof. Jan Gross — who has run afoul of Polish nationalists for his research documenting Polish collaboration with the German occupiers — the violence in Kielce was started by police officers and soldiers who were supposed to be protecting nearly 200 Jews, mainly Holocaust survivors, who had taken shelter in the local Jewish Committee building, as an angry mob of more than 1,000 Poles gathered outside. In a shocking echo of the anti-Jewish medieval “blood libel,” the Jews of Kielce had been falsely accused of kidnapping a nine-year-old boy, Henryk Błaszczyk, who had disappeared for two days and subsequently told his parents that he had been captured by Jews in order to avoid being punished.

According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Polish soldiers and policemen [in Kielce] entered the building and called upon the Jewish residents to surrender any weapons. After an unidentified individual fired a shot, officials and civilians fired upon the Jews inside the building, while outside, the furious crowd viciously beat Jews fleeing the shooting, or driven onto the street by the attackers.”
Why has China turned on Israel? - opinion
WHAT, THEN, accounts for Beijing’s abrupt and vocal anti-Israel turn? Part of the answer can be found in China’s increasingly desperate efforts to shift the international conversation away from its ongoing genocide against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

By supporting the plight of the Palestinians, China is cynically stoking the most emotional issue in Middle Eastern politics in order to distract Muslim nations from its own domestic campaign to “break the lineage and roots” of Chinese Muslims via an extensive system of gulags. At the same time, Beijing’s expanding investments throughout the Middle East in recent years (in arenas ranging from Lebanon’s telecom sector to assorted infrastructure projects in Egypt) have effectively bought the silence of Muslim governments when it comes to Chinese human rights abuses.

Another reason relates to China’s choice of regional partners. Over the past several years, Beijing has inked strategic partnerships with at least seven countries (including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq). But, as the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission explains in a new report, China’s sprawling 25-year strategic pact with Iran is the centerpiece of its Mideast strategy.

If fully realized, that deal would be a boon for China, giving it preferential access to infrastructure and telecom projects in the country, access to Iranian port facilities, and significantly expanding military cooperation between the two regimes. The cumulative effect of the deal is to transform Iran into a critical hub along China’s vaunted Belt and Road Initiative, and in doing so give China a vital stake in the Islamic Republic.

China’s response to Israel’s recent conflict with Hamas should serve as a wake-up call for policy-makers in Jerusalem. It highlights that, despite its extensive financial stake and political platitudes, there are real limits to China’s alignment with Israel. Indeed, the Israeli government’s recent backing of a Canadian-sponsored UN resolution on the Xinjiang genocide suggests that a rethink on China policy may already be under way.

For the rest of the Middle East, meanwhile, China’s anti-Israel turn represents a cautionary tale, one that states in the region and beyond would do well to take to heart: Beijing’s friendship today is no guarantee of its fidelity tomorrow.
The cyber threat the Hamas-Malaysia front poses to Israel - opinion
EVEN MORE shocking, these groups are using social media platforms to maliciously attack users on the platforms. They provide lists of accounts to hack and harass, as well as specific instructions on how often to tweet or comment without getting their own accounts suspended, how to use a VPN and from which countries, how to hide their identities in order to engage in “cyber warfare,” and more. All of this is done on mainstream social media platforms in Facebook groups, Telegram channels, WhatsApp and Twitter. Thus far, the social media platforms have done nothing to shut it down. How can Facebook be allowing their own platforms to host groups of half a million people who use the group for the purpose of silencing another group? How can a campaign of half a million tweets which are all exclusively being used to harass one particular group of people go unnoticed by Twitter? It’s simply unacceptable.

New research on what happened during the operation indicates an orchestrated and well-planned effort across social media platforms to target Israeli and Jewish users. Using Telegram, activists in Malaysia used channels with thousands of followers such as “Team Suspend Twitter” in which they sent out lists of major pro-Israel accounts, followed by instructions on how to maliciously attack the accounts with fake passwords to trigger account suspension.

One of the leading groups behind this cyber attack was a Facebook group called the “Malaysian Troll Army” which has over half a million followers. Throughout the operation, this group sent out calls to harass, hack and otherwise silence pro-Israel digital voices. In my case, I received over 100,000 mentions on my Twitter from Malaysia. Another group which works with the Malaysian Troll Army is the Cinta Syria Malaysia (CSM), with 300,000 followers, and its sister organization, Cinta Gaza Malaysia, which is run by a Malaysian in Gaza, Nadir al-Nuri.

Al-Nuri himself has a Telegram network of over 256,000 followers, which he activated during the operation to carry out the cyber bullying, providing a list of pro-Israel accounts to hack and shut down. While there’s yet to be direct evidence, it’s hard to imagine that a Gaza-based anti-Israel activist with hundreds of thousands of followers isn’t taking any kind of direction from Hamas, especially during wartime.

Given the documented illegal nature of these cyberattacks, which includes providing leaked private data such as individual phone numbers of Israelis for the purpose of harassment, the social media companies must take action in actively monitoring the targeted harassment from these Malaysian channels and shut them down. Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp must prevent the abuse of their platforms and other users on it. It’s time to shutter the Hamas-Malaysia front.
Belarusian president: Whole world 'bows' to Jews due to Holocaust
Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko claimed that the “whole world bows” to the Jews due to the Holocaust, during a memorial service for Soviet soldiers who fell during World War II last week.

“Jews were able to make the world remember [the Holocaust], and the whole world bows to them, being afraid of saying one wrong word to them,” said Lukashenko. “On our part, we, being tolerant and kind, did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings and let the things down to the point when they have started to hurt us.”

The speech focused on the role of Belarusians in fighting the Nazis alongside Soviet forces, with the Belarusian president stressing that more work was needed to ensure that people remember Belarus’s part in World War II. “This work has already begun with the investigation into the crimes of Nazism on the Belarusian soil. This is akin to the Holocaust of the Belarusian people,” said Lukashenko.

Israel's Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that Lukashenko's comments were "unacceptable."

The Deputy Director-General of Eurasia and the Western Balkans Division in Israel's Foreign Ministry, Gary Koren, has summoned the interim supervisor at the Belarusian embassy in Israel for a conversation in light of this.

Some 800,000 Jews (90% of the Jewish population) were killed in Belarus during the Holocaust, according to the European Jewish Congress. While in some other countries, the local population helped the Nazis massacre local Jews, Belarusians did not do the same and several individuals and small groups even helped protect Jews, according to the US nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves.


New education minister won’t reinstate Israel Prize for alleged pro-BDS academic
New Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton has decided to uphold her predecessor’s decision not to award the prestigious Israel Prize to a professor accused of backing boycotts against Israel, Hebrew media reported Tuesday.

Oded Goldreich, a professor of computer science at Israel’s Weizmann Institute, was selected by a committee to receive this year’s prize in mathematics and computer science for his work on computational complexity theory. However, the education minister at the time, Yoav Gallant blocked Goldreich from receiving the prize, alleging he backs the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Goldreich has denied backing BDS but said he objects to West Bank settlements.

The prize’s selection committee has since filed a petition with the High Court of Justice against the decision.

According to the Kan public broadcaster, Shasha-Biton is planning to inform Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and the High Court that she does not intend to get involved. Mandelblit needs to decide whether to defend the minister’s position against a High Court petition filed by the prize’s selection committee.

Quoting sources in Shasha-Biton’s office, the report said she spoke with Mandelblit and that afterwards there was an understanding the decision was final, with the matter now in the hands of the High Court.
Arsen Ostrovsky on ILTV - Aid money to Gaza must not reach Hamas



Incendiary Balloons: Hamas’ Explosive Terror Tactic Against Israel
Hamas’ Rationale For Using Exploding Balloons Co Opted by Media

During May’s conflict, Hamas justified its rocket barrage against Israel by citing Sheikh Jarrah and the Al-Aqsa Mosque “protests.” The media often take the terrorist group at its word, ignoring the fact that Hamas has repeatedly attacked the Jewish state irrespective of what the government in Jerusalem was doing at the time.

In fact, there were multiple calls for violence by Palestinian politicians against Israel and unprovoked attacks against Jews weeks before Sheikh Jarrah made international headlines.

This makes sense, as Hamas is openly committed to Israel’s destruction.

What also goes unmentioned by the media is the fact that the Palestinian Authority canceled what would have been the first presidential and legislative elections since 2005 and 2006, respectively. This increased tensions between the Mahmoud Abbas-led government in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

Many analysts have speculated that Hamas initiated May’s war in order to demonstrate its anti-Israel credentials and thereby increase its popularity among Palestinians.

And it worked.

According to a recent public opinion poll conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, support for Hamas has increased dramatically while backing for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ ruling Fatah faction dropped significantly. The poll found that if new Palestinian presidential elections were held, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would get 59 percent of the votes, compared to 27 percent for Abbas.

Hamas would also win in a parliamentary election, with more than 40 percent of respondents saying they would cast their ballots for Gaza’s rulers as opposed to 30 percent for the West Bank-based Fatah.

But instead of holding Hamas accountable, news organizations have repeatedly failed to provide much-needed context regarding the terror group’s history, tactics and stated desire to annihilate Israel and Jews everywhere.


PMW: A tale of multiple realities - the death of PA critic Nizar Banat
As part of the efforts of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party to quash internal decent, on June 24, 2021, PA Security Forces arrested and allegedly beat and killed the vocal PA critic Nizar Banat. Banat’s death sparked widespread demonstrations and counter demonstrations, and a plethora of accusations. While feigning regret and empathy, the PA and Fatah are now using Banat’s death as a means to invent a conspiracy theory about a "Hamas coup".

Days after the death of Banat, his brother, Ghassan Banat, said that Abbas’ Advisor on District Affairs Ismail Jabr and other figures in the PA had made the family a generous proposal:
“The proposal includes having [the family] come to [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas’ office in order to recognize Nizar as a Martyr, asking for the amount that we want, and the payment of a Martyr’s salary to his family.’”

[Shehab, independent Palestinian news agency, June 28, 2021]

According to the report, the family not only rejected the proposal, but also expressed its “opposition to the investigative committee that the PA established, because the parties who are members of it are part of the PA.”

While expressing “condolences to Banat’s family”, Fatah in the West Bank responded to the demonstrations by announcing, as if they wield legitimate authority, that they “will oppose all the attempts to harm” the PA security establishment and “will strike with an iron fist anyone who is tempted to disparage the members of our security establishment.”

“The northern branches of the Fatah Movement (i.e., Fatah in the West Bank) announced that the Palestinian [PA] security establishment will not be alone in the battle of defending our people, its rights, and its cause. They added that we will oppose all the attempts to harm it, to harm its image, and to exploit this event (i.e., the death Nizar Banat) in order to spread venom, and that we will strike with an iron fist anyone who is tempted to disparage the members of our security establishment.”

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, June 27, 2021]


How does a more radical Iran think?
The mullahs realize they have new strategic rules. The IAEA is suspicious of unearthed secrets in Iran’s nuclear program. Reports of large amounts of 60% enriched uranium may be reported to strengthen their negotiating position. Some even believe that the hard line approach to the relationship with the IAEA was intended to encourage it to issue warnings about an impending nuclear Iran.

As was the case when IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi spoke and famously warned recently about the “genie” that will come out of the “lamp,” which some and I see as pleasing the mullahs, the impact on US negotiators is far greater than the impact of the threats from the mullahs’ leaders.

That was the case when Secretary of State Tony Blinken suggested that Iran could be weeks away from having nuclear weapons materials if it keeps violating the nuclear deal.

So Iran’s Supreme Leader has decided to take one last step in brinkmanship, to go all in to win major US concessions in order to lift the tough sanctions. This maneuver requires changing the face of the regime and wearing a tougher mask.

It even chose to promote a president on the US sanctions list who is a revolutionary hardliner. All this means that leaving things as they are will push the mullahs to adopt new radical measures regionally and internationally.

The West is well aware of the impact of the absence of any “moderate” profile to talk to in the Iranian political arena. No one knows who will succeed Mohammad Javad Zarif as head of Iranian diplomacy. It is also unclear whether Iran’s most prominent negotiator in Vienna, Abbas Araghchi, will complete his role or go back home with his superiors.

All of these elements are putting pressure on the Vienna negotiations. They are putting pressure to get Iran the concessions it is demanding quickly. President Joe Biden wants to speed up the resolution of the Iran nuclear deal and focus on China’s defiance of US influence. In addition, there are signs of growing tension in Russia’s relations with the West.







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